A little braver this time – 1 ply yarns

When it comes to my spinning preferences , they were clear up to this day – I was making 2 ply and n-ply yarns all the time. Thus I ousted yarn singles from my workshop entirely. Enlightenment came when I got the tops of Wensleydale sheep, or rather sea waves! I made a dye mixture using primary colors to achieve orange and green (or at least I thought it did) and dyed it. In the pictures you can see that the colors haven’t been mixed perfectly, but this only added more beauty to it in my mind.

The wool was quite unlike anything I’ve ever had in my hands. Hair is very long, glossy and so strong I did not worry about breaking a yarn at all. After a few spun meters I was sure that this thread does not need to be doubled or tripled. Fiber length ranges between 18 and up to 30 centimeters and its thickness is between 36 and 45 microns . In the pictures you can see my 102 g (3,6 oz) skein which has 337 meters (368,5 yds).

The wool will be itchy for sure, but the experience of spinning it was amazing . I’ve already ordered three times more of it than I had and I will spin it with pure pleasure. I dream of shades of blue and silver. We’ll see 🙂

After this wensleydale debut I searched through my wool resources and found something completely different -this time I decided to focus on nice 21 mic merino. Pure softness.

I was in need of joyful colours, hence the dominant one is sunny yellow. I ‘blushed’ it with orange, which eventually went redder than it was intended and I broke everything with a touch of navy blue. This one, in turn, combined with the dominant yellow adapted to the rest and gained greenish saturation. This set of colours reminds me of iris flowers so I named it this way and this is my ‘Iris’ yarn:

I spun 101 g (3,56 oz), 515 m (563 yds), additionally during winding the wool on a niddy noddy I counted the wpi (wraps per inch) parameter and each time I received the result 29. To measure it you can wind the yarn around anything – a piece of wood, plastic.. anything with 1 inch marked. This is a great way of measuring the actual yarn thickness and thus picking the proper needle or crochet hook size.

Another top was dyed by my fiance. I must say here I am more than shocked.. this was his secod dyeing attempt in his life and he already made me jelaous. This colours combination looks great to me:

I must admit that after what I heard from other spinners about spinning Blue Face Leicester I was expecting literally fireworks. But instead of that what I received was a portion full of short hairs which felted during dyeing (I had to pull them out from the wool one by one) and the fibre itself was not extra long. What’s good however is that the yarn is really soft. It’s not itchy at all, yet we’ll see how will it work in a shawl.

My last 1ply yarn I’ve spun in my minimarathon is soft and pleasant to the touch Falkland wool.

This Falkland is a blend of wool from sheep bred in the Falkland Islands, mainly merino. It’s soft, not itchy at all and definitely will stay with me for a long time. Personally, I like a bit itchy wools, yet I believe than everyone has moments when some delicate shawl wrapped aroung the shoulders is the best thing to be.. An additional advantage of this wool is that it’s very convenient to be spun . No surprises , no challenges , just relax 🙂

To sum up my 1-ply minimarathon – I consider it to be a complete success . Till now I’ve avoided spinning the singles at all cost and now I just love them . I can not wait now to finish my current project to them on my needles – unless someone else will like them till that time 😉

Time to sit back behind my wheel now – norse sheep are being spun right now. There is no time to even think of lying and doing nothing 😀